“I did get this though.” Darren pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and held it up for me to see. The document said “Railer Design” at the top and contained a bunch of drawings and words I didn’t understand.
“What is it?” I said.
“It’s the engineering specs for the Tantalus. I’ve never been able to decipher it, but I know of a couple people who probably can.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said, smiling.
He hiccuped again. “Let’s see if Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos really are as interested in Gus’s secrets as he thinks they are.”
I left the casino on the last bus. It was 3:45 a.m. when I walked through the door of my hotel room. I put my bag and binder on the desk and poured myself a glass of water. I was washing the makeup off my face when the phone rang. Not my cell phone, the phone in my room.
“Hello?”
“Halley,” he said.
“Gus?”
“I need you to come to my room right away. Don’t ask any questions, just come.”
“I don’t think . . .”
“Halley, this is an emergency. Come to my room. NOW.” He hung up.
I thought about what to do. The middle of the night, your boss tells you to come to his hotel room, all kinds of things could happen. Had he found out about Rousseau? Was he going to fire me? Was he drunk, lonely . . .?
I reluctantly grabbed my room key and pulled the door closed behind me. I was still wearing my suit. The halls were quiet; the hotel slept. I took the elevator to the penthouse floor. I had to think for a second about whether Gus was in Penthouse A or Penthouse B, because Anthony was in the other one, and that would be an unfortunate mistake. Luckily, Gus had propped his door open by popping the lock out. I went inside.
The room was dim and messy. Clothes were strewn on the floor, on couches. An army of empty minibar liquor bottles stood uncapped on the coffee table, next to several haphazard little piles of white powder. I hardly noticed the baby grand piano, the beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows, the oriental carpets. Partly because of the oddness of the circumstance, and partly because my job had begun to inoculate me against a certain kind of hotel grandeur. For those who travel with the very rich, every new penthouse is a little shot of adrenaline; soon you build up a tolerance, and you must increase your dose to get the same high.
I followed the light coming from the bedroom. For a second I thought maybe I’d entered the wrong room, and I turned to leave. A person lay ass-up on the bed. A woman with the same face as Anthony’s wife, Annabella, tossed there like a rag doll someone had grown tired of playing with. I looked closer and—oh, shit—it was Annabella. Then I saw Gus in a bathrobe, squatting in the corner of the room with his head down. He stood when he saw me. His eyes were red like he’d been crying. The pieces fell into place, Gus’s secrecy, the phone calls. This was “ciao bella.”
“I think she’s dead,” he said.
I stared at her. This could not be happening.
“You have to help me, Halley,” he said nervously. “Normally I would call Darren for this sort of thing, but . . . I can no longer trust him to act in the company’s best interests. I think she did too much coke.”
He was really on a roll tonight, killing-wise. I walked over to get a closer look.
“If anyone finds her here,” he said, “I’ll be ruined. And if I’m ruined, Findlay will be ruined.”
“Help me turn her over,” I said.
We rolled the body over with one heave and I got to see Anthony’s wife in all her naked glory. Gus had probably been screwing her just a few minutes ago. Ick. I wondered how long it had taken him to notice she’d gone pale and limp. I put my fingers to her neck and found a faint pulse. “Move,” I said, pushing Gus out of the way. I climbed onto the bed, cupped my hands together and started chest compressions over her compact little breasts.
“Plug her nose and breathe into her mouth,” I said. “Now!”
He bent over her face, smeared with crimson lipstick, and did as he was told.
I called it out. “One. Two. Three. Now breathe,” I said. “Again.”
We continued for five, maybe ten minutes. My arms started to hurt and I wondered if we were doing this right. I’d only practiced on plastic dummies. Gus let out a little squeal.
“I think she’s breathing,” he said.
I put my face next to her face that smelled like expensive perfume. “It’s shallow. Gus, we have to get her to a hospital.”
“How? If we call an ambulance they’re going to come up here, people will find out.” He spoke fast and his hand shook nervously. “I already killed one person today. This hotel room is covered with drugs. Anthony the Wanker is right next door. What if she dies? No, no. No.”
“Well, she’ll probably die if we don’t get her out of here.”
“Do what you have to do, Halley. Just take care of it, and don’t let anyone find out.” He turned around and walked out of the room.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “Get back here!”
Gus crossed the penthouse to the other bedroom, closed the door, and locked it behind him.
I sat on the edge of the bed next to Annabella and thought about what to do. There was a strong compulsion to leave, to quit, just like Darren had. This was insane! Insane. How had this become my responsibility? I should call an ambulance, that seemed like the right thing to do. To hell with Gus. But what if I was just overreacting, what if Annabella was going to be fine?
An idea came to me and I ran out of the room. I propped the penthouse door open with the swing bar and took the elevator to the lobby.
A lone bellman stood at the bell stand. “Do you have a wheelchair I can borrow?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Je ne parle pas Anglais.”
I ran down the hall to the reception desk, my heels clicking loudly on the floor. “Do you have a wheelchair I can borrow?”
The man behind the desk nodded. I followed him back down the hall, past the coffee counter and the light gray couches, through the restaurant and bar, to a storage room near the back of the building. I held the door open while he went inside. In a few seconds, he wheeled the chair out for me.
“Call an ambulance,” I told him.
“Sorry?” he replied.
“Emergency,” I said. “Hospital. We need someone to drive a sick person to the hospital. I’ll be back.”
“D’accord,” he said and made to follow me.
“No, you stay,” I said, holding a hand up. “Call the ambulance. I’ll come back with the sick person.”
“Okay,” he said.
I pushed the wheelchair to the elevator and back up to Gus’s penthouse. When I got there, Gus was back in the room with Annabella again.
“Jesus, Halley, I thought you left,” he said.
“Just to get this.” I pushed the wheelchair toward the bed. “We have to put some clothes on her and get her into this thing. Reception is calling an ambulance. I’ll wheel her downstairs and I’ll tell them I found her like this. I found her in the hall, she was unresponsive, so I sent for an ambulance. The hotel will have cameras, but I’ll make sure they get rid of the tapes.”
“How are you going to do that?” Gus asked.
“How do you think?” I said. “Money.”
We shimmied Annabella’s black crepe dress back over her unconscious body. It took us three tries to hoist her onto the wheelchair. She kept falling forward, so I used Gus’s belt to fasten her in. Her head drooped and rolled. I propped her feet on the foot rests, released the wheel brakes, and started down the hall, barely breathing. Gus closed the door quietly behind me.
I’d almost made it to the elevator when the door to Penthouse A opened. Anthony emerged, eyes searching.
“Halley?”
Every bone in my body wanted to run away. I co
uld play dumb tomorrow, pretend I didn’t know anything about it. What happened to Annabella? Annabella who? How did she get in a wheelchair? Beats me. Why were you pushing her down the hall? Must’ve been somebody else.
“Halley, what are you doing?” Anthony said.
It was hard to look at him, after seeing his awkward, dad-like “Thriller” moves. He was wearing a plaid bathrobe, pajama pants, and slippers, which was exactly the sort of thing I would’ve imagined him wearing to bed.
“Hotel security found Annabella downstairs. She must have had too much to drink,” I said. I wondered if he could tell I was lying. To myself, it was obvious.
“I was bringing her back up to your room, but then I realized she’s in pretty bad shape, so I thought maybe I should get her to a hospital instead.”
“Oh,” he said. He came over and prodded her a couple times, put a hand under her chin and tilted her head back, opened her eyes with his fingers.
“Whose belt is that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered quickly.
The air between us filled with awkwardness as he took note of his wife’s smeared lipstick and recently-fucked hair. I was still just a Level 2, after all, and he was still the company president. The only way this situation could’ve gotten more personal was if I’d fucked Annabella myself.
“I’ll come with you,” Anthony said. “To the hospital. Just let me change clothes.”
I waited with Anthony’s still-unconscious wife in the hall. God, what a night. I said it to myself over and over again until Anthony came back out and I walked him and Annabella to the ambulance. What a night. What a night. What a night. What a night.
38
Everyone was a little worn out, a little hung over, still murmuring about the acrobats and dead Stuart and Anthony doing The Thriller. I left the conference center in the afternoon to freshen up before Rousseau’s podium talk, the one event I knew for sure he would attend. The air was cold and damp, and traffic was heavy. A group of suited and name-tagged conference attendees waited to cross the street, and when there was no clear crossing, one of the guys walked out in front of a moving vehicle with his hand up. The car stopped and we passed safely to the other side like geese.
I walked through the hotel’s revolving door, turned my eyes toward the elevators, and there he stood. It was really him. I was totally unprepared. I had assumed I would see him around the conference throughout the week, and I’d known I would see him giving his lecture up on stage in a few minutes. But this. The magnitude of him. Right here in front of me. I stopped breathing. He wore his gray suit and leaned against the coffee counter with his arms crossed, speaking with Eduardo Masio, another distributor, in Spanish. I’d imagined this moment for weeks, always in the most cinematic way possible. We would lock eyes, walk slowly toward each other and collide in an epic Hollywood kiss. But, as it happened, he didn’t even see me.
I sidestepped a bellman and stood behind a tall potted plant for a few minutes like a stalker, watching him. The way he stood so still and confident. I wondered if he thought of me, if he remembered the things I remembered, the way I remembered them. I envied Eduardo, being able to talk so easily to him the way I once had, without any history or baggage. How was it that everyone in that lobby didn’t fall in love with the laugh lines around his eyes when he smiled, and want to hear every thought he had about life?
I started multiple conversations with him in my head. “How have you been?” I might say. No, that was banal and awkward. How about: “How could you do this to me?” Nope, too accusatory. Maybe: “Sometimes I miss you so much I want to die.” No, that was way too desperate. In the end I settled for “I think of you,” and I hoped he would understand the rest.
When Eduardo walked away, I moved toward the place where he stood, ready with my arsenal of words. Rousseau turned his head in my direction, saw me and did a doubletake. Our eyes met for several long seconds, frozen. For months, maybe years, I would try to dissect the look on his face in that moment. It defied description, that look. If there was a meaning behind it, it was one I could not comprehend. It was neither happy nor anguished. It wasn’t placid or impassioned. He felt something, I knew he did. I just couldn’t tell what.
I stood, steps away from him, and didn’t speak. The seconds pulsed loudly in my ears like heavy train wheels rumbling over steel tracks. Everything else—the hotel, the people, the potted plants—disappeared. We seemed to stand there for days inside the fusion reactor of our past, somewhere far away from Paris, all the words we’d said to each other bouncing and crashing into one another, all that we’d done swirling around us. Pizza. Night clubs. Hotel room kisses. Airport tears. Smart-assed banter. Crushing fights. You’re the thing I look forward to every day. What if the only way to preserve this is to end it?
I had so many questions. I wanted to know what it was that had made us different, why that spark had existed between us if, in the end, we were destined to fade to nothing. We had always been possessed by the idea that what we’d experienced was not of this world. But was it? Or were we like prehistoric cavemen who attributed the existence of fire to God simply because they had no knowledge of combustion? Now, looking him in the eye, I wasn’t so sure. He didn’t run toward me and embrace me. He didn’t even say hello. And what did that mean?
A cynical thought entered my mind, that maybe there had never been any cosmic connection between us. I didn’t want to believe it, but as it began to take shape, I wondered. Maybe we’d felt so connected precisely because we knew we never really could be. If he walked toward me now and said, “I will go with you,” if we left this place and moved into a house together and had the whole future ahead of us, if we could gorge ourselves on one another until we were sick, maybe we would have eventually ended up with exactly the same kind of life he had with Chloe. Maybe that was what he was really waiting all those months to figure out—whether time takes its toll on all relationships, no matter how predestined or cosmically perfect they seem in the beginning. Whether the mundane drudgeries of real life—the time-dulled feelings, the little hurts and resentments—affect everyone the same. He might have eventually strayed from me as easily as he’d strayed from her, endlessly searching for greener pastures. Because the truth was that what Rousseau and I really wanted was to want. To believe it existed. To set our horizons by it and run headlong toward it, and when we reached it, to hit the reset button and start all over again. The stagnation of life felt a little like death, and it was a doorway leading away from death. It was a return to youth, a return to all the wild possibilities of our future selves. Rousseau would never go through that door—of course he wouldn’t—but he wanted it to be there, waiting on the horizon, just in case. And so did I.
Before I had a chance to second guess myself, I broke free of his gaze, turned, and walked away. I fought back tears, pressed buttons, and put my feet forward. I dropped my binder off in my room and changed into jeans. My phone rang, and I grabbed for it, believing it was him, ready to run to him, wherever he was, and take it all back a thousand times. But it was Anthony. I swallowed my grief and answered.
“Halley? I was hoping we could talk.”
“Sure,” I said, rubbing the wetness from my eyes with the back of my shirt sleeve.
“I wanted to say thanks for helping out last night, with Annabella. She’s fine now. A little worse for wear, but we’re back at the hotel.”
“That’s great. I’m so glad.”
“She doesn’t remember anything. I was hoping you could help fill in the blanks.”
I thought about outing Gus. He deserved it. But I held back. If the worst happened, it might be useful to have this knowledge in my back pocket.
“I really don’t know anything,” I said. “What I told you last night is the whole story.”
Anthony paused. He probably knew I knew more. He sighed.
“If you think of anything else, will you
let me know?”
“Of course,” I said.
I hung up the phone and lay back on the bed. My room felt saturated with silent ghosts. Thoughts, questions, histories, futures. So many things I’d always thought I’d have figured out by now. It was a cynical move, withholding information from Anthony so that I could use it against Gus. And the worst part was, I took pleasure in the cruelty of it. In the power it gave me over both of them. That’s when I realized how much I’d changed.
I took a shower. The hotel soap smelled like pineapple. I wrapped myself in a big white towel and wrapped a second towel around my hair. The mirror had fogged over, and drops of water cut lines through the fog. I stood in front of the bureau and flipped through the room service menu. A salade nicoise, maybe. I was debating whether or not to order wine when my phone buzzed with an email. It was from Gus.
“We need to talk,” it said. “Meet me at that oyster place a few blocks down the street at noon tomorrow.”
Below that was an email that Celeste had forwarded to him.
I stopped reading, ran to the bathroom, and threw up in the sink.
39
Celeste’s door was propped open. I knocked anyway.
“Come in, Fredo!” she shouted brusquely from the bed.
“It’s Halley,” I mumbled. “Who the hell is Fredo?”
Celeste’s bum foot was propped up on some pillows and there were more pillows between her back and the padded headboard. The room was a complete mess. Empty Pringles cans had begun to collect next to the bed and there was a pile of dirty towels partially covering Celeste’s worn-out, tire-marked Tumi.
“Oh,” she said. “Well since you’re here would you mind filling up my water bottle?” She held it out toward me. “Also could you get me another pillow out of the closet? And that can of Pringles that’s in the mini bar? Thanks.”
“Anything else, your highness?”
The Insatiables Page 24